On Being an Engineer
2025-02-02
Well I'm officially a licensed engineer, at least in California, Electrical #24256. I never expected to need a PE license. I grew up with my dad being an electrical engineer, and was exposed to his fun projects growing up: home built RC model planes, a BattleBot, and an electric car powered by a trunk full of lead acid batteries. So I went to UC Davis to study electrical engineering. I also liked chemistry so I talked to an advisor about a joint materials science and electrical engineering program. In both of these programs I was interested in embedded electronics and their underlying operation. I was expecting to go and work in industry.
Towards the end of my college career, the relationships between classes like thermodynamics, kinetics, semiconductor processing, and device physics were becoming clearer and more intuitive. But in every class there would be a chapter it two we would skip, the promise of something more that was too advanced. Several professors even said, "This is covered in the graduate level class. If you want to learn more about it, take the graduate level version of this class."
So I knew I wanted to go to grad school. After talking with a couple professors, I was referred to a professor who participated in some organization that ranks research institutions. I had only been in one of his classes and hadn't been particularly involved. His only question for me: what's your GPA? From which he gave me a short list of 4-5 schools that would be appropriate for me. I don't know what my search criteria had been, but those ended up being the majority of my applications. He also offered to write a recommendation letter, which I wasn't expecting.
I had no specific research interest and minimal experience, which wasn't fruitful, really more process development than research and not particularly robust even for that. Thinking back on my application, I'm surprised that I got offers from 3 of the 4 universities on that short list. Talking with my colleagues now, I see how most of them were much better prepared that I was for getting a PhD.
Somehow I made it through grad school with a PhD in materials science and an extra MS in management, intended to be a 1 year program but stretched out to 2 years to for within my research. Towards the end, writing the dissertation was definitely a struggle. I can understand how people leave programs ABD. If I had somehow not finished or failed the defence, I probably would have left in that state.
The majority of my advisor's funding during my time there came from industry partners like IBM, Intel, or Applied Materials, and the graduating students typically found jobs in those companies. Intel's recruitment included a slide on why they love hiring PhD s and it included maintaining your own equipment, working long hours, and being on call. Those didn't speak to me, so I reached out to my undergrad senior design advisor from Keysight.
Keysight has a reputation as a good place to work and it was a great change of pace from grad school. I still see my prior coworkers often and count many as close friends. However, I felt like there weren't the growth opportunities there that I was looking for and I ended up at Exponent, an engineering consulting company.
I'm all my time interested in engineering I had never really considered consulting as a career. It held the promise of working on more varied projects and getting more exposure to electrical engineering problems in addition to the materials science I was accustomed to. But starting was when I found out that "selling engineering services" to the public requires a professional engineering license. So it's not just for civil engineers after all! The closest options were metallurgy and materials, which is primarily metallurgy and not my area of expertise, or electrical, which was 10 years ago. I opted for the electronics, communications, and controls PE that was more in line with my interests.
As the title of the website suggests, the topics contained here will be my musings and not anything related to my marketable expertise. I started the website long before I even knew I would be an Engineer, although I still considered myself an engineer.